CEOs of medical start-up companies, investors, writers, and lawyers attended a networking event at Merrill Lynch tonight. The room was packed and was full of energy during the happy hour session.

John R. Lieberman CPA/PFS at Perelson Weiner LLP and Wendy Altman Brown, assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch, co-hosted the Medical Technology Startups Networking Event. I have watched this event grow over the past year. High-level investors and industry executives are becoming regulars. One lawyer was excited to tell me that he remembered me because I am a writer.

After the business cards are quickly exchanged during the happy hour, most people stay to hear a guest speaker and three medical tech executives discuss their companies.

Tonight’s guest speaker, Sandra Holtzman at Holtzman Communications, talked about customer focused marketing. To illustrate her point, she described zit popping in detail. Stiefel Laboratories wanted to ask a customer focus group about their acne fighting gel, so they could design a website that was catered to their tastes before they officially launched the zit product.

In the focus group, the teenagers were asked what they wanted the website to look like. One teenager said he wanted to see two fingers popping a pimple.

Ewwwwwww.

That was a little much for the executives, so the company designed the page so that zits would pop, when the teens scrolled their mouse over the zits.

The acne gel, Duac Gel, sold like crazy. It was Stiefel Laboratories’ most successful launch, says Holtzman. GlaxoSmithKline ended up buying Stiefel for $2.9 billion last year.

Thanks to SEO magic, companies can create websites that have a lot more influence than buying an ad in a magazine would. So, start-ups need to brand themselves. “It’s not what you say, it’s what they take away,” says Holtzman.

Start-ups Need To Know How To Brand Themselves is a post from: TechStartups.com

If you’ve used Twitter for anything longer than 2 days, you’re probably coming to terms with the fact that Twitter Spam is an unfortunate reality that’s starting to spread, and spread a lot quicker than anyone would like to admit. While current reports are putting TwitSpam at only 3.69% of all Tweets, when you consider the sheer number of Tweets posted each and every day, that’s a scary high number of Spam posts clogging up Twitter’s pipes. What to do?

If BotKiller, a spam-filtration system, has anything to say about it, they’ll take care of that and hopefully clean out the entire system that is getting progressively thicker with nasty spam. They use some sort of fancy “algorithmic classification” to go through all of the data that’s presented daily and weed out the offenders, while keeping the real messages intact and on point. According to reports:

“Petabytes of new information are created daily. This data is meaningless unless we can find what we’re looking for. Everyone has had the experience of search results that are polluted with false keywords and unsolicited advertisements. BotKiller can make those go away and make realtime search relevant again.”

Can it actually work? I suppose we’ll see, but I know one thing is for sure, in addition to the spam Tweets, someone needs to come up with a way to get rid of spam Users. I am inundated daily with more and more Twitter followers that are really just fake accounts for people to try to market their products or site. The scary thing is, the sheer number of pornographic accounts being created and following people daily is amazingly high. Yikes.

That said, I hope BotKiller works out, because Twitter is tough enough to sort through as it is.

Twitter Spam, Who Ya Gonna Call? BotKiller! is a post from: TechStartups.com

by Senior Staff Writer – Tyler Knott Gregson

Can you think of a time in the last 8 months that Twitter hasn’t been in the news? Honestly? Didn’t think so. That said, they’re in the news again, and they’ve officially reached our top spot for Startup in the Spotlight. Now, there’s a bit of back and forth going on between the head honchos at Twitter and those that claim to know Twitter’s future.

A few days back, in case you missed it, one of Twitter’s investors, Todd Chaffee recently mentioned some plans he believed were in the startups future on how to actually start making some money off their product. In his eyes and beliefs, he thought Twitter was going to start raking in the dough by offering real-time shopping suggestions and links as their desires pop up. More than that, they thought the suggestions could even go as far as to be potentially sponsored. Chaffee thought he was right on the money, but Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO, was quick to point out the flaws and inconsistencies of his story.

According to Williams:

“To be clear: Todd is a Twitter investor and a very smart and helpful guy…However, he is not actually on Twitter’s board and, in this article, he’s brainstorming on his own. These are not in the least bit concrete plans of the company. “

Yeah, feel free to file that one in the “oops” column for Chaffee. So if they’re not confirming this, not planning on doing this, the age old question of exactly how will Twitter make money remains. Anyone else want to go out on a limb and guess?

Rumors of Twitter Monetizing Apparently UnTrue is a post from: TechStartups.com

Raise your hand if you love music? Yeah, just about everyone. Now raise your hand if you love concerts but never, ever have a clue where they are, who’s playing, what time, how much tickets cost or even if you can GET tickets? Yep, again just about everyone. Looks like there is a tech startup out there that is aiming to do away with all that annoyance, and make it easy to find out just about everything you could possibly want to know about concerts, from tickets to venues, dates to lineups.

That startup is called LiveKick and I suppose you could think of it like a Kayak type search engine that helps you find out everything you could need to know about concerts in your area. LiveKick helps you, and is extremely accurate in not only it’s results, but its suggestions as it asks you a series of questions ranging from your location to your musical tastes. It can even import data from your iTunes, Pandora and Last.fm to figure out your tastes. After this, it can actually help you find the concerts you’d most like to go to. According to TechCrunch:

“After establishing your musical taste and location, Livekick’s proprietary technology will crawl ticket sites like Ticketmaster, LiveNation, StubHub, TicketWeb, Tickets.com and eBay, as well as user-generated content sites such as MySpace Music, to inform you of promos, cheap ticket deals, and ticket sales for the concerts of the artists you listen to. The Livekick search engine performs daily updates of ticket pricing info for the concerts that it tracks in the US and provides real-time updated ticket pricing information from the concert ticket web sites. The site will take you to the site where the tickets are being sold to purchase concert tickets.”

Wow…Count us in. There is a lot of competition out there in this market, so we’ll see if it has the staying power to actually make it happen. Time will tell, as usual, and we’ll be watching the whole time. This is one startup we’d like to see make it.

LiveKick: The Concert Lovers Startup is a post from: TechStartups.com

Every now and again we catch wind of a startup that really has some promise, or at the very least makes us extremely excited about its potential. Today is that day, and Nextstop is that new startup that has us saying…Wow, this could be really, really great.

Imagine if you took Yelp, except for aimed it directly at all of the people around the globe that are traveling, that are travelers, and that are looking to find out what there is to do, where to do it, and exactly how much fun you’ll actually have when you finally are doing it. The good news is, there seems to be a fairly robust community base that is going to help populate this thing and actually provide some pretty great opinions on everything from restaurants to mini-golf places around the globe, the bad news is, the service might be a bit tougher to monetize than they previously thought, and if that’s the case, we might have trouble actually seeing it succeed. Bummer.

There still might be hope, but there are some factors that make things look a bit grim…according to reports:

“The company’s lone source of income is expected to be advertising, despite the rough market for ad-driven startups. If that seems like a tough slog, consider this: Nextstop isn’t planning to spend much on marketing, either. Graham pointed to Wikipedia as an example of the adoption pattern Nextstop is aiming for, in which a small set of people contribute most of the relevant information. But Wikipedia was online for several years before it became useful, and Yelp — a brand which surely overlaps with Nextstop’s intended market — took awhile to reach critical mass as well. “

Time will tell, all we know is we’re hoping for some success out of them. After all, how else will we find the best seafood restaurant/miniature golf course in Ft. Myers, Florida?!

Nextstop Looking to Be Yelp, But For Travelers is a post from: TechStartups.com

Twitter started it, Friend Feed adopted it, Facebook’s doing it, and now, it looks like Digg is dropping little hints that it too will be doing it. IT, in this case, is the extremely popular and borderline over-used term of “real-time.” That’s right, word on the block is that sometime in the next few months, Digg will be jumping on board the “real-time” bandwagon and adding it to a complete overhaul of their existing site.

When it will happen remains to be seen, but according to TechCrunch it will be sometime in the next 6 months. We already know they revamped their search, and now it’s looking like the entire site will be changing. Michael Arrington sat down with Kevin Rose and tried to uncover some answers. Check out the video below to get a few teasers at what we might be expecting sometime in the near future.

Digg to Go “Real-Time” Sometime In The Near Future is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Staff Writer – Tyler Knott Gregson

Welcome to the future. It’s amazing to think that if you rewound the clock just a few decades, we’d just be first walking on the moon, and the dark, grainy images on black and white television screens would be lighting up with those pictures. Now, fast forward a few more decades to today and we get the news that NASA’s astronaut will be tweeting, yes, from Space. How far we’ve come, how far indeed.

His final, pre-space tweet read: “I’m going to put my spacesuit on, next stop: Earth Orbit!!” and before that he had been Twittering his entire training process and everything he’d had to do up to this point. The great news is, he told reporters at a press conference that he fully planned on continuing this, and wanted all of his Twitter followers to stay tuned for updates from space. How entirely amazing.

Talk about a tech start-up success story. What started as a quick way to update your friends and family as to what you’ve been up to, or where you were going, has now turned into a full-blown service that everyone from celebrities, to NASA, to yes, even the White House uses.

This mission for NASA and the astronauts involved, is to repair the Hubble Telescope that is in orbit around Earth. When it “won’t interfere” astronaut Mike Massimino will be tweeting to keep all of us “Earth-bound” people completely in the loop. All we can say is…Wow.

NASA’s Next Astronaut To Tweet…From Space is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Staff Writer – Tyler Knott Gregson

Every now and again we stumble onto an idea or a Tech Startup that is just pure genius. When that happens, you look at that idea and realize that in a sea of startups that will flash and fade, some have that coveted staying power. Mingle360 looks to be one that will be around, and be around for quite sometime.

We were lucky enough to hear from the VP of Sales & Marketing of Mingle360 and he filled us in on a huge amount of information about their product, the MingleStick. Here’s what Bradley Blinn of Mingle360 had to say:

Mingle360 (www.mingle360.com) based in Fairfax, VA, offers event organizers a solution that greatly enhances attendee networking at events. The electronic business card technology surpasses business cards with up to date contact information and even facial recognition. The MingleStick technology creates ‘buzz’ and excitement at the event and helps differentiate the organization from the competition. All in all, Mingle360 is the easiest way to turns real-world conversations into online connections that produces dramatically more valuable networking events.

How it Works

Two MingleStick users point their MingleSticks at each other and press a button. The red flashing light turns green to indicate a successful connection has been made (watch this “How It Works” video: http://www.mingle360.com/video_minglestick_works.html). Several hundred connections can be stored on the MingleStick device. The MingleStick is then plugged into a computer and the connections are uploaded online. Within their account, users can link to other social profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, etc to facilitate their online networking.

Attendees Love the MingleStick

Attendees truly love the technology because it’s a great ice breaker and conversation starter. It doesn’t take long before you hear someone say “Wanna Mingle!?” This video captures customer testimonials about the MingleStick at a recent convention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybuTb3xJU0U

Event organizers can contact Mingle360 if they’re interested in bringing the MingleStick technology to their event. Feel free to contact us: http://www.mingle360.com/contact_us.html Mingle360 is also found on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mingle360

Head over and check them out, you won’t regret it!

Mingle360: Startup With Staying Power is a post from: TechStartups.com